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"Sunless Sea": Genesis of a motion picture screenplay
Abstract
This study seeks to focus attention on the screenplay as a neglected phase of film studies. The theoretical introduction asserts the essential place of the screenplay in the filmmaking process without diminishing the importance of the screenplay by relegating it to a mere phase in the process preliminary to its filmatization. By diminishing the emphasis on the filmatization, one re-establishes the primacy of the screenplay as a verbal text, and sees the screenplay as analogous to a theatrical drama prior to any particular staging. Like a play, the screenplay becomes freed for the imaginative experiences of readers who have no need of--indeed, can be blissfully unaware of, any filmatization. The screenplay thus having achieved the status of a verbal text like any other, the hypostatization of the filmatization is overcome and the screenplay can be submitted to readers for continual re-reading, or re-interpretation. A screenplay-based film criticism, then, ideally fulfills the Barthesian anti-theological impulse to demolish thematically-based criticisms which instrumentalize and reify the art work by making readers consumers, rather than producers, of texts. In the study's effort to assert the screenplay's status as text, the second draft of Sunless Sea follows the introduction. This revised or re-inscribed screenplay represents the collaborative transformation of the writer's first draft by professional filmmakers who wish to produce a filmatization of the writer's screenplay. Reproduced, as an Appendix, is the first draft of this screenplay. The process by which the second draft emerged from the first dramatizes the disappearance of the empirical author, thus fulfilling the post-structuralist notion of the "death of the author," implying that the screenplay is paradigmatic of structuralist and post-structuralist notions of "reading," a deauthorized or author-less text liberated from authorial intention, purpose, or ultimate design, only to undergo continual re-interpretation.
Subject Area
Motion Pictures
Recommended Citation
Umland, Samuel Joseph, ""Sunless Sea": Genesis of a motion picture screenplay" (1987). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8803773.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8803773